Hey, you! Yeah YOU!
How come you haven't registered? Have you read about our new blue star program? We are donating $10 of each blue star subscription to the Blue Ribbon Coalition to ensure that we will have trails to recreate on for years to come.
Our blue star comes with all the benefits of a red star such as 10 second searching, blue/red star member only giveaways, access to the private blue/red star member forums, etc.

Raptor lined the interior of the cab today. Im most likely going to carpet the floor and possibly leave the tranny tunnel sides exposed.

The raptor liner is pretty easy to use. I used a full 4 liter kit to make sure it was thick, 2 heavy coats. Apparently different PSI's will provide different textures. I set it at 45 PSI and went for it. Turned out great.

Painted the truck this weekend. Its the original color, Toyota beige 464. Went with a single stage paint out of a harbor freight spray gun. Cost me $130 for the quart of paint, some reducer and activator. Paint brand is Nason.

A LOT of prep lead up to this, just so I can go smash it on some rocks eventually. This is the first time I've painted any vehicle or just anything with a gun. I could have done way more, but I had to draw the line somewhere. Honestly I should have done less to save a lot of time.

It came out pretty decent for a half assed makeshift paintbooth in the garage, youtube videos guiding me through this process and just plain guessing. Theres dust in it everywhere if you look close but oh well. Thats kind of how I expected it to be. It probably didnt help that the girlfriend decided she wanted to come in and out of the garage to do about 4 loads of laundry WHILE I was painting. But of course Im the asshole for telling her not to do that.

Ive been working on the cab stuff here and there when I have a break from school.

I made some carbon fiber trans tunnel and door panels then clear coated them. I remade the window cranks. Put some Alpine speakers and tweeters in the doors.

The trans shifter boot was purchased from JB fabrication. No one seems to make any twin sticker shifter boots that would allow a lot of forward and backwards travel so I decided to make it myself. Sewed up some vinyl, cut some stainless plate, and that black strip around each stainless plate is 'door edge gaurd' from autozone.

The roof got a full treatment of sound deadener, some 1/2" foam. then a pirate flag

Put the rear window in. That thing was a major pain in the ass.

The one piece rear window is 1/4" Lexan. I took the frame apart, caulked the groove, flexed the Lexan in, and screwed the frame back together. Then I tinted the window with some 15% tint.

I had a new windshield installed professionally. I dont think I would have been able to do that myself.

School has been keeping me busy and stressed as usual. However I managed to make some time to build a sub woofer box. The original plan was to put a shallow mount 10" behind the driver seat because space is incredibly limited behind the seats. Then I decided I could probably squeeze a 12" shallow mount in there somewhere. I ordered the wrong sub (I ordered a 2 ohm dual voice coil, instead of a 4 ohm), after lots of searching and pricing amps, subs, etc, I decided on a somewhat regular mounting depth 12" sub.

I knew it wasnt going to fit behind the seat and didnt really want the face of the sub almost touching the back of the seat anyways. So I decided it was going to directly in the center for an even better hearing loss experience. This way I will also be able to brand match the entire stereo, not that it really matters.

I knew space was going to be really tight and the box needed to at least have about .6 ft^3 minimum. After taking a million measurements I drew the box up in Solidworks to see what the volume was going to be and to see if the sub would even fit in the box and not contact the back.

Since the box was such a strange shape it has lots of weird angles so I used the Solidworks drawing to get all the measurements and angles and just hoped that it would actually go together. Out come the Skillsaw (since I dont have a table saw) and I just started going for it. Glued, screwed, sanded, sealed, and wrapped in some vinyl I got at a local fabric/upholstery store.

This was the first sub box Ive made. came out pretty decent I think and Ill have to wait a while to see how its going to sound. I have a feeling this sub is going to pound the shit out of this tiny single cab.

If anybody has any recommendations or advice concerning car audio please let me know. Im just going off of what Ive researched from the interwebs.

Tech Specs:

Box: 1/2" MDF inside volume: .665 ft^3 glued, screwed, sealed(caulked inside corners),
wrapped with vinyl. Mounting: Tee-nuts are secured on the
inside of the box, bolts go through the tranny tunnel from
underneath with a series of rubber washers/o-rings to seal the
holes completely and to cut down on vibration

School continues to kick my ass. But at least I get to make carbon fiber stuff if I want/have time.

I made some carbon fiber plates to mount the amplifiers. Isolated them from the rear wall of the cab with some rubber feet made for big speaker cabinets I got on amazon for about $5 (for 8). This was done in hopes of reducing the amount of vibration the amps see. Both sides of the mounting hardware has stainless bonded sealing washers as well.

That is some killer detail put into your box and system! Looks amazing, very cool. I swear I didnt see this previously before I made mine. I had many different designs in mind before I settled on this and its crazy to see how similar ours are! I for sure would have cut out the hump in the back wall like you did, had I have known that I was going to try and put a full 12" sub right there. But I really didnt want do any more body/sheet metal work.

Couple of questions for you:
Do you have more of a buildup of your truck and/or system?
Did you lay that carbon up yourself and how?
Where did you get that dash topper?

If you're going DSP...
Run your sub to 100-120hz. 18db slope. Solid and tight.
Bring your midbass in at 100hz to 2500hz 18db slope.
Tweets at 2500 and up 18db

Passive, set your high pass around 100-120 and experiment from there.

I'm taking the TWK88 out soon. EZ DSP that I'll be selling on DIYMA.

Nice, solid work on your rig.

Keep the build going....

I dont know if ill be running a DSP or not. Honestly I never even considered it until you mentioned it. Seems expensive and time consuming, but what isnt when you want to do it right? I will definitely research it more and see if its the direction I want to go.

I very much appreciate the advice. Your builds/work is insane and quite inspiring. I cant believe I havent seen any of it before. I definitely planned to make a carbon dash panel(s). It mostly depends on how much time I want to spend on making the tooling. Realistically I was thinking of making a shittier version of what you got going. The organic contours of the panels are what have held me up mostly.

Ive been pretty busy working on the rig over the summer. I worked for a month at Cal Poly teaching middle school and high school kids about mechanical engineering and doing various engineering activities for a summer camp thing they have going on.

Here are some pics of the progress so far. Its getting closer...

I knew I had to reinforce the front coilover mounts and running a bar over/around the engine was not an option. Nothing would fit under the hood.

BTW Ive been rolling and bending all this DOM (most of it is cold rolled) by hand. Fun stuff.

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